Part 7

This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright parti-colored garments of white and red and yellow, under a black mantle embroidered with small sparkling stars. Upon the woman’s forehead was a disk, like a round glittering mirror; seen closer, it was engraved with tiny characters, and Kennaston viewed it with a thrill of recognition. To the woman’s right were vipers rising from the earth, and to the left were stalks of ripe corn, all in their proper colors. In one hand she carried a golden boat, from which a coiled asp raised its head threateningly. From the other hand dangled three or four slender metal rods, which were not a part of the statue, but were loosely attached to it, so that the least wind caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing whatever in the gray-walled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and the mechanical toy on which he labored.

He explained its workings, willingly enough. See now! you kindled a fire in this little cube-shaped box. The air inside expanded through this pipe into the first jar of water, and forced the water out, through this other pipe, into this tiny bucket. The bucket thus became heavier and heavier, till its weight at last pulled down the string by which the bucket was swung over a pulley, and so, moved this lever.

Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest admitted he had copied the toy from one made by Hero of Alexandria, who died years ago. Still, it was an ingenious trifle: moreover—and here was the point—enlarge the scale, change the cube-shaped box into the temple altar, fasten the lever to the temple doors, and you had the mechanism for a miracle. People had only to offer burnt sacrifices to the Goddess, and before their eyes the All-Mother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the human race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy, and would condescend to animate her sacred portals.

“We very decidedly need some striking miracle to advertise our temple,” he told Kennaston. “Folk are flocking like sheep after these barbarous new Galilean heresies. But the All-Mother is compassionate to human frailty; and this device will win back many erring feet to the true way.”

And Kennaston saw there were tears in this man’s dark, sad eyes. The trickster was striving to uphold the faith of his fathers; and in the attempt he had constructed a practicable steam-engine.

II

Deals With Pen Scratches

THEN Kennaston was in Alexandria when John the Grammarian pleaded with the victorious Arabian general Amrou to spare the royal library, the sole repository at this period of many of the masterworks of Greek and Roman literature.

But Amrou only laughed, with a practical man’s contempt for such matters. “The Koran contains all that is necessary to salvation: if these books teach as the Koran teaches they are superfluous; if they contain anything contrary to the Koran they ought to be destroyed. Let them be used as fuel for the public baths.”

And this was done. Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to witness this utilitarian employment of a nation’s literature; and it moved him strangely. He had come at this season to believe that individual acts can count for nothing, in the outcome of things. Whatever might happen upon earth, during the existence of that midge among the planets, affected infinitesimally, if at all, the universe of which earth was a part so inconceivably tiny. To figure out the importance in this universe of the deeds of one or another nation temporarily clustering on earth’s surface, when you considered that neither the doings of Assyria or of Rome, or of any kingdom, had ever extended a thousand feet from earth’s surface, was a task too delicate for human reason. For human faculties to attempt to estimate the individuals of this nation, in the light of the relative importance of their physical antics while living, was purely and simply ridiculous. To assume, as did so many well-meaning persons, that Omniscience devoted eternity to puzzling out just these minutiæ, seemed at the mildest to postulate in Omniscience a queer mania for trivialities. With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man’s bodily organs, left the man’s parish unaffected: only man’s thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words—since marble and canvas inevitably perished—was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of sixty-three plays written by Æschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides—masterworks eternally lost, which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally, whatever might be the world’s real opinion in the matter.

But of these verbal artificers something at least was to endure. They would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals in splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the feet of Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiad—the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with these—Telecleides, Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander—“whom nature mimicked,” as the phrase was. And here, posting to obliteration, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus—and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the poet’s ageless monomania, had toiled toward, and had attained, the poet’s ageless goal—to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this action’s normal by-product, which is immortality in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the circumstance that parchment is inflammable.

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted—quite wantonly—never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all....

These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato’s octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of water.... But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho’s from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition; in an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the _Mimes_ of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare’s dramas, which had never been printed.

And—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its felicities to be the object of human life—Kennaston could not, after all, detect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Æsthetic considerations could, in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment was precious.

III

By-Products of Rational Endeavor

THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two hurt fingers.

“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work,” he considered.

“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him.

“To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save this, _Imaginis imago_, created after God’s image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear man’s destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man’s demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be.”

“Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.”

The old man said testily: “I repeat, for your better comfort, there can be no doubt that Satan alone conspires to hinder the great work. No; it would be abuse of superstition to conceive, as would be possible for folk of slender courage, that the finger of heaven has to-day unloosed this destruction, to my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition.” Kennaston could see, though, that the speaker half believed this might be exactly what had happened. “For I am about no vaunting transgression of man’s estate; I do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will say to me, it is written that never shall any man be one day old in the sight of God?—Yet it is likewise written that unto God a thousand years are but one day. For this period of time, then, may each man righteously demand that death delay to enact the midwife to his second birth. It advantages not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to such longevity; for Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the progeny of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was created in the perfect age of man, which then fell not short of one hundred years, since at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers beget issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was given him; and the years of Adam’s life were nine hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceeded a thousand years in age, if not in duration of existence. Now, it is written that we shall all die as Adam died; and caution should not scruple to affirm this is an excellent dark saying, prophetic of that day when no man need outdo Adam in celerity to put by his flesh.”

Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been compounding nitrum of Memphis with sulphur, mixing in a little willow charcoal to make the whole more friable, and that the powder had exploded. The old man was now interested, less in the breakage, than in the horrible noise this accident had occasioned.

“The mixture might be used in court-pageants and miracle-plays,” he estimated, “to indicate the entrance of Satan, or the fall of Sodom, or Herod’s descent into the Pit, and so on. Yes, I shall thriftily sell this secret, and so get money to go on with the great work.”

Seeking to find the means of making life perpetual, he had accidentally discovered gunpowder.

* * * * *

Then at Valladolid an age-stricken seaman, wracked with gout, tossed in a mean bed and grumbled to bare walls. He, “the Admiral,” was neglected by King Philip, the broth was unfit for a dog’s supper, his son Diego was a laggard fool. Thus the old fellow mumbled.

Ingratitude everywhere! and had not he, “the Admiral”—“the Admiral of Mosquito Land,” as damnable street-songs miscalled him, he whimpered, in a petulant gust of self-pity—had not he found out at last a way by sea to the provinces of the Great Khan and the treasures of Cipango? Give him another fleet, and he would demonstrate what malignant fools were his enemies. He would convert the Khan from Greek heresies; or else let the Holy Inquisition be established in Cipango, the thumbscrew and the stake be fittingly utilized there _ad majorem Dei gloriam_—all should redound to the credit of King Philip, both temporal and celestial. And what wealth, too, a capable emissary would bring back to his Majesty—what cargoes of raw silks, of gold and precious gems, ravished from Kanbalu and Taidu, those famed marvelous cities!... But there was only ingratitude and folly everywhere, and the broth was cold....

Thus the broken adventurer, Cristoforo Colombo, mumbled. He had doubled the world’s size and resources, in his attempts to find some defenseless nation which could be plundered with impunity; and he was dying in ignorance of what his endeavors had achieved.

* * * * *

And Kennaston was at Blickling Hall when King Henry read the Pope’s letter which threatened excommunication. “Nan, Nan,” the King said, “this is a sorry business.”

“Sire,” says Mistress Boleyn, saucily, “and am I not worth a little abuse?”

“You deserve some quite certainly,” he agrees; and his bright lecherous pig’s eyes twinkled, and he guffawed.

“Defy the Pope, then, sire, and marry your true love. Let us snap fingers at Giulio de Medici—”

“Faith, and not every lass can bring eleven fingers to the task,” the King put in.

She tweaked his fine gold beard, and Kennaston saw that upon her left hand there was really an extra finger.

“My own sweetheart,” says she, “if you would have my person as much at your disposal as my heart is, we must part company with Rome. Then, too, at the cost of a few Latin phrases, some foolish candle-snuffing and a little bell-ringing, you may take for your own all the fat abbey-lands in these islands, and sell them for a great deal of money,” she pointed out.

So, between lust and greed, the King was persuaded. In the upshot, “because”—as was duly set forth to his lieges—“a virtuous monarch ought to surround his throne with many peers of the worthiest of both sexes,” Mistress Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke, in her own right, with a reversion of the title and estates to her offspring, whether such might happen to be legitimate or not. A pension of £1,000 per annum, with gold, silver and parcel-gilt plate to the value of £1,188, was likewise awarded her: and the King, by thus piously defying Romish error, earned the abbey-lands, as well as the key of a certain bed-chamber, and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for thus inaugurating religious liberty.

IV

“Epper Si Muove”

THESE ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this or that chance-opened page from the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him, men had labored blindly, at flat odds with rationality, and had achieved everything of note by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the cry of Maugis d’Aigremont—“It is very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man may discern no plan or purpose anywhere.”

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest _clichés_ of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets here, too, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest....

And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness. The puppet-shifter appeared to seek at once utility and artistic self-expression. So the protoplasm—that first imperceptible pinhead of living matter—had become a fish; the fish had become a batrachian, the batrachian a reptile, the reptile a mammal; thus had the puppets continuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms more captivating to the eye, until amiable and shatter-pated man stood erect in the world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship, however far he was as yet from godhead—blindly moving always, like fish and reptile, toward unapprehended loftier goals.

But, just as men’s lives came to seem to Kennaston like many infinitesimal threads woven into the pattern of human destiny, so Kennaston grew to suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth was but an incident in the unending struggle of life to find a home in the universe. Human inhabitancy was not even a very important phase in the world’s history, perhaps; a scant score or so of centuries ago there had been no life on earth, and presently the planet would be a silent naked frozen clod. Would this sphere then have served its real purpose of being, by having afforded foothold to life for a few æons?

He could not tell. But Kennaston contemplated sidereal space full of such frozen worlds, where life seemed to have flourished for a while and to have been dispossessed—and full, too, of glowing suns, with their huge satellites, all slowly cooling and congealing into fitness for life’s occupancy. Life would tarry there also, he reflected; and thence also life would be evicted. For life was not a part of the universe, not a product of the universe at all perhaps, but, rather, an intruder into the cosmic machinery, which moved without any consideration of life’s needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless engine, insanely building among moving wheels and cogs and pistons and pulley-bands, whose moving toward their proper and intended purposes inevitably swept away each nest before completion—so it might be that life passed from moving world to world, found transitory foothold, began to build, and was driven out.

What was it that life sought to rear?—what was the purpose of this endless endeavor, of which the hatching of an ant or the begetting of an emperor was equally a by-product? and of which the existence of Felix Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its unimportance? Toward what did life aspire?—that force which moved in Felix Kennaston, and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, a temporary visitor, in the big moving soulless mechanism of earth and water and planets and suns and interlocking solar systems?

“To answer that question must be my modest attempt,” he decided. “In fine—why is a Kennaston? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the higher the fewer—but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I personally am interested....”

* * * * *

“Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself—thus whimsically voicing the inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries—with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was “queer” enough to face the situation quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very possibly placed on—at all events, infesting—a particular planet for a considerable number of years; the planet was so elaborately constructed, so richly clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and running waters and multitudinary grass-blades, and the body that housed Felix Kennaston was so intricately wrought with tiny bones and veins and sinews, with sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which grew upon the body like grass-blades about the earth, that it seemed unreasonable to suppose this much cunning mechanism had been set agoing aimlessly: and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these years of human living to some intelligible purpose?

Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was written explicitly, in various books, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed, all available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly. To liken the relationship to the intercourse of a father with his children, as did all revealed religions with queer uniformity, was at best a two-edged simile, in that it suggested a possible amiability of intention combined with inevitable duplicity. The range of an earthly father’s habitual deceptions, embracing the source of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility on the other, was wide enough to make the comparison suspicious. When fathers were at their worst they punished; and when in their kindliest and most expansive moods, why, then it was—precisely—that they told their children fairy-stories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that all religions ended in this blind-alley.

To exercise for an allotted period divinely-recommended qualities known as virtues, and to be rewarded therefor, by an immortal score-keeper, appeared a rather childish performance all around. Yet every religion agreed in asserting that such was the course of human life at its noblest; and to believe matters were thus arranged indisputably satisfied an innate craving of men’s natures, as Kennaston was privileged to see for himself.

Under all theocracies the run of men proved much the same: as has been said, it was for the most part with quite ordinary people that Horvendile dealt in dreams. The Roman citizenry, for instance, he found did not devote existence, either under the Republic or the Empire, to shouting in unanimous response to metrical declamations, and worrying over their own bare legs, or in other ways conform to the best traditions of literature and the stage; nor did the Athenians corroborate their dramatists by talking perpetually of the might of Zeus or Aphrodite, any more than motormen and stockbrokers conversed continually of the Holy Ghost. Substantial people everywhere worshiped at their accustomed temple at accustomed intervals, and then put the matter out of mind, in precisely the fashion of any reputable twentieth-century church-goer. Meanwhile they had their business-affairs, their sober chats on weather probabilities, their staid diversions (which everywhere bored them frightfully), their family jokes, their best and second-best clothes, their flirtations, their petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irrational faith in Omnipotence and in the general kindliness of Omnipotence—all these they had, and made play with, to round out living. Ritualistic worship everywhere seemed to be of the nature of a conscious outing, of a conscious departure from everyday life; it was generally felt that well-balanced people would not permit such jaunts to interfere with their business-matters or home-ties; but there was no doubt men did not like to live without religion and religion’s promise of a less trivial and more ordered and symmetrical existence—to-morrow.